November 20, 2006

PYNCHON HIGHLIGHTS

Like many writers with a reputation for difficulty, Pynchon’s books are often screamingly funny. I asked several of my esteemed colleagues to name their favorite scene from Pynchon’s oeuvre. You're invited to join them and post your favorite scene from Pynchon’s previous novels in the comments section below. - Jim Ruland

Sean Carswell: My favorite Pynchon? Mason and Dixon smoking pot with George Washington while Washington's slave sits around making master jokes. Tyrone Slothrop escaping in a hot air balloon and fending of Major Marvy's Mothas with custard pies. Tyrone Slothrop dressed up as the pig-themed superhero stealing hash from Harry Truman's windowpane.

Louis Gallo: It's been quite a while since I've read V, I didn't like Vineland much at all, but two scenes stick out for me from Gravity's Rainbow: 1. The utterly gross, disgusting shit-eating scenes. 2. The sudden disappearance of Slothrop from the novel altogether, except for the sound of his harmonica in the distance. That bit was fantastic. Main character just disappears!!! Into the Preterite, I assume.

Susan Henderson: The scene that sticks out for me is easy. It's Esther's nose job in V. The doctor who does the surgery is an old war veteran who knows first-hand about the fraternity of freaks who have suffered deforming injuries in war. He's a rough man with old-fashioned techniques for plastic surgery; and there's Esther on the day of her surgery, medicated numb but not unconscious. And the whole scene is gruesome and oddly sexual. There's a line the doctor says as he's sawing and snapping bones about how frail we all are. God, it's wonderful, and you're not at all expecting what happens when she returns to his office for post-op, all wild-eyed and bandaged and turned on.

Dan Kaplan: Here's one that strikes me. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, in her quest to understand the operations and verify the existence of the mail-distribution organization Trystero, wanders into Golden Gate Park, where she happens onto "a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours." Such a simple, profound piece of oddity--Oedipa happening onto others' collective dream, which is apparently her own reality--that perpetuates the blurring of what does and doesn't exist, is "real" or imagined in the novel. Amplifying the spookiness is that these are displaced, spectral children who are on the outskirts of safety, hiding in surprising places and deceiving those who love them. Disturbing. Love it.

Carolyn Kellogg: So much of Pynchon's work is ridiculous wordplay to the extreme -- say, the shrink Dr. Hilarius in The Crying of Lot 49, paranoid and locked up while the police come to arrest him -- that it's easy to overlook how prescient he is. In that book, published in 1966, there's a bar near Yoyodyne populated with engineer-type conspiracy theorists listening to Stockhausen on the jukebox; Saturdays are live electronic music nights. Ridiculous and futuristic, maybe: but since the 1990s, I've been going to that bar. We've all been there. It's at the bar that protagonist Oedipa first sees a drawing that looks like a muted trumpet. It may symbolize a secret mail system, which might imply many other things (then again, it might not). I had the symbol tattooed on my wrist. Some people recognize it. One day I was at Trader Joe's and the checkout guy asked me about it. "It's from a book," I said vaguely, not wanting to sound too smarty-pants. He asked about the book and I told him. "Yeah, I knew it," he said, smiling. I asked what he thought of The Crying of Lot 49, but he hadn't read it; I was the third person who'd come to his register that week with the same tattoo. Either I'm a member of a vast conspiracy (so secret that I'm unaware of it), or there are legions of Pynchon fans out there, all wearing our affiliation on our skin.

John Leary: V, I read in 1994, when I was "stationed" in Vietnam. V is a book about paranoia, and I loved it, and it spoke to me deeply, it seemed. Then a few years after I left Vietnam I read in the newspaper that Lariam, the anti-malarial medication I was taking in Vietnam, had as one of its side effects paranoia. So, that didn't exactly ruin the book for me, but it maybe lost a little resonance. I no longer really want to go to Malta, for example.

Scott O’Connor: I’m a big fan of a sequence not far into V., where the two protagonists, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, cross paths for the first time in the NYC sewer system. Profane has gotten work with a shabby band of alligator hunters, all armed with 12-gauge shotguns and unreliable flashlights, navigating the narrow refuse pipes far below Manhattan. Stencil, following his own plotline (and the title character of the book), has also journeyed down into the sewers--disguised, unfortunately, as an alligator. In the course of Profane’s pursuit of the gator, we hear the troubled bureaucratic history of the alligator patrol, the story of the patrol’s boss, brief glimpses of other guys on the squad, and the hair-raising legend of a Depression-era Catholic priest who tried (and failed gruesomely) to bring religion to the rats of the very sewer system Profane is stumbling through. All this within the 20-odd pages of Chapter Five, and told from the perspectives of (among others) Profane, Stencil, Father Fairing, even a couple of the catechized rats in question. Profane finally catches up to Stencil (in what must be one hell of a convincing gator costume). Gunshots ensue. The density of imagination in Pynchon sequences like this always remind me of Silver-Age Fantastic Four and Justice League comics: each panel is so packed with action and ideas—a fight scene, lines of overlapping dialogue, a villainous diatribe, subplots lurking in the background—that it threatens to become completely overwhelming when, at the last second, it propels you off into the next panel, and the next and the next, careening hellbent to the end of the book. More bang for your buck, really, with this kind of stuff.

Karen Palmer: Pynchon himself dismissed 1965's The Crying of Lot 49, saying, "I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." But the book -- witty, sly, and absurd -- offers the melancholy pleasure of prescience. In an early scene Pynchon's heroine, Oedipa Maas, encounters the Peter Pinguid Society, a group of right-of-the-Birchers, drip-dry-suited Yoyodyne engineers whose Civil War hero commanded the Confederate man-of-war "Disgruntled." In 1863, Pinguid (Dubya) plans an attack on San Francisco (Iraq), to open a second front for the war (on terror). Meanwhile, Russia dispatches its Far East Fleet, hoping to discourage Britain and France from aiding the Confederacy. The "Disgruntled" may have sighted one of the Russian ships (WMD); shots may have been fired (9/11); some vessel or other may have been sunk (Mission Accomplished) . . .

Rolf Potts: My strongest impression from his writing comes from the only book of his I read, V, where he's talking about how Benny Profane rides the subway and is weak with lust because there are so many pretty girls everywhere. I was like 21 when I read that, and it seemed so true. Still does, on spring days in NY or Paris.

Danna Sides: I loved Gravity's Rainbow even though experiencing the book was very much like chasing a rabbit down wormhole after wormhole, which leads to yet another wormhole. I enjoyed thinking about the mythological and occult connections conflated with world events, and how literally everybody and everything was in there: Andrew Jackson to Hansel & Gretel; genocide to seriously twisted sex. If I had to chose, I'd say I especially like the flashback of when Slothrop loses his blues harp down the loo and the Orpheus/descent into the Underworld allusions. I also enjoyed his oblique commentary on genocide: Herero/Jews. Lots of humor and serious rage right under the surface. His brain is like Google: his associations are limitless, fluid, wild interconnections galore. I remember thinking his prose made my brain tingle like when I drink a little too much champagne.

Benjamin Weissman: The bar scene in V with the bosom nipple spigots has never left me.

Antoine Wilson: My favorite/most memorable Pynchon moment is probably the visit with Washington in Mason & Dixon, where Washington is smoking hemp, being entertained by the proto-Sammy-Davis-Jr. slave, and Martha brings in the munchies.

Comments

Oh, my turn. I'm delighted that no one cited the English candy scene from Gravity's Rainbow. And then there's the vaguely remembered but still funny taffy pull scene. The chain sex orgy on the boat, the over-the-top espionage slapstick featuring Katja and Grigori the Octopus, the oversized oneiric adenoid plaguing the dreams of Pirate Prentice - there's more funny in a page of Pynchon than a season of SNL.

I also love the increasingly silly epigraphs that accompany each part of Gravity's Rainbow. If I recall correctly, the first part quotes Werner von Braun on the possibility of eternal life ("Nature knows nothing of extinction, only transformation"). The last section, "The Counterforce," is accompanied by a quotation from Richard Nixon: What?

Two highlights:
the ricocheting aerosol can in the motel toilet after Oedipa's reverse strip (in 'Lot 49);
and the long section in Gravity's Rainbow where Roger and Jessica attend a Christmas church service somewhere in Kent - one of the most moving sequences in modern literature.

I started my first trip into Gravity's Rainbow as a sophmore at UC Santa Cruz (during the time when Pynchon was supposedly living in the area) but I finished it the next year as an exchange student in Goettingen, Germany, about 100 miles from the Harz Mountains. The scene that grabbed me then was Slothrop and Leni sitting on that mountain top, casting their giant shadows on the clouds. It felt like Pynchon had knowingly wrapped me up in the narrative.

Early in Vineland, a commercial flight to Hawaii is intercepted by a UFO and boarded by its occupants. To some on board the plane, this is entirely routine. To others, it is reason to break into song, and the song is cover for an escape. I love the musical moments in Pynchon's novels, but this is probably my favorite.

Also extremely early in one of his novels, the description of banana breakfast in Gravity's Rainbow is one that sticks with me. The endless variety of the menu, and that he wrote so much about a single ingredient, remaining funny and vibrant, not boring, is astounding. He'd have won Iron Chef, Writer's Edition.

In my world, those seven words are what literature is for. Whenever I think about Pynchon, the ludicrous run-on sentences, the smart-alecky carnival-barker asides, the goddamn limericks, the coprophagia and calculus, it all comes back to Roger and Jessica.

So many things stick, but the oddity of observation is what claws at your mind - thinking "How does he do that?"
From '49' - The house numbers were in the 70,000's - Oedipa had never seen them so large.
and of course, the radio station - KCUF - In the early '70's, that word was not spoken in polite company - if at all.

OMG ... what a plethora. Kudos to the first commenter for nailing *both* The Disgusting English Candy Drill *and* the Giant Adenoid. Both wet-your-pants hysterical. I used to force my friends to read the candy scene aloud until we were collapsing on the floor in hysterics. "Cubeb? Slothrop used to *smoke* that stuff ... like a journey to the center of a small, hostile planet ... " Unbelievably funny. And the Adenoid scene is also a pitch-perfect evocation of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds: "It's like a stupendous *nose*, sucking snot ... " before the cable breaks and the observation balloon is lost ...

In V. it would have to be that brief interlude when Profane, reading a copy of "Existentialist Sheriff" given him by Bodine on a night shift guard duty at a research lab, is confronted by SHOCK (Synthetic Human Object, Casualty Kinematics -- a crash-test dummy) and the even more ominious SHROUD (Synthetic Human, Radiation Output Determined). Pynchon uses this vignette to expose his historical method. (Paraphrasing) "In the 18th century, man was essentially considered clockwork. In the 19th, when thermodynamics was all the rage, man became a heat engine, about 30% efficient. Now, in the age of nuclear physics, man is a thing which absorbs radiation." Both deeply comic-absurd and incredibly disturbing ...

In Lot 49, there are just too many amusing moments -- the advertising exec who wants to do the Buddhist monk thing on the kitchen floor and his wife sneaks in with the efficiency expert she's cheating with: "It took you this long to consider committing suicide? You know how long it would've taken the IBM 1407? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced!" Or the SF gay bar, where Oedipa gets her "Hi, I'm ARNOLD SNARB and I'm looking for a good time!" name tag. Arnold Snarb, jesus christ :) But nothing's quite like the scene-by-scene description of The Courier's Tragedy: "Act III ended in a refreshingly simple mass stabbing."

Mason & Dixon, for me, would be all the wonderful interludes in the story between the flirtatious cousins Ethelmer, DePugh and the hauntingly-named Tenebrae -- and their oboe-playing Aunt Euphrenia. 'Thelmer's spinet rendition of "To Anacreon in Heavean" (which of course became the Star-Spangled Banner) is a delightful exegesis of both music theory and a theory of insurrection -- connecting Plato's Republic with (as DePugh cheekily suggests) "surf music" :)

In Vineland, I found the parts with Prairie and Che's crush-relationship, as well as DL Chastain's rotten home life to be a quantum leap in character development for Pynchon -- both very moving and well-drawn.

And the most moving thing in all of Pynchon's writing as far as I'm concerned remains the central novella section of GR -- the sad story of Franz and Leni Polker -- which I described in a later thread.

Don't forget the chance meeting between Tchitcherine and Enzian on the road. A-and how about the airborne pie fight, with the Americans singing dirty limericks involving rocket parts? Or the immortal phrase, "Fick nicht mit dem Racketemensch!"

It is definitely that scene between Tchitcherine and Enzian towards that end of Gravity's Rainbow that has most stuck with me, from all of Pynchon's books. Even now, nearly 17 years after reading it. "This is magic. Sure--but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it." On the one hand it's so terribly anti-climactic. But on the other it's such an expansively touching moment, their exchange of "broken German", "half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw potatoes." No violence. And then the sunset over the Zone.

Oh absolutely. Even though that little vignette just files by (and is, purely plotwise, entirely "anticlimatic" as climaxes are understood in ordinary narratives), I think it's very close to the heart of the book. And I also think it's one of the novel's few but powerful moments of heart-rending poignancy. It also resolves one of the most important plotlines -- the blind ethnic (and projected self-) hatred that had caused Tchitcherine to nearly annihilate his African half-brother and his never-quite-explicated plans for Rocket 00001.

What makes this passage so important, I think, is a reverie, several pages before, that jump-cuts between perhaps the two most oppositional figures in the book: the adorable apprentice witch Geli Tripping and the literally monstrous Uber-sadist Captain Blicero. In one of Pynchon's patented untelegraphed transitions, the perspective shifts from Geli emptying her mind to recieve the magic she'll need for the later scene, to Blicero pouring the poisoned content of his heart out to his willing victim Gottfried. Astonishingly, the content of the reverie remains continuous. What is different are the interpretations.

The reverie is one of Pynchon's great epiphanic moments where he parts the curtains -- like the seance conjuring Walter Rathenau, Slothrop in the Mittlewerke, Polker's dream of Kekule's benzene-ring Orouboros, various Schwartzkommando episodes -- to reveal his overarching vision:

"... green spring equal nights ... canyons are opening up, at the bottom are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell ... human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive it was a threat: it was Titans. was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler *had* to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counterrevolutionaries. *It is our mission to promote death*." (GR 720 Viking ed.)

And from Geli's reverie, into the nub of Blicero's:

"In Africa, Asia, Amerinda, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propogate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It learned empore from its old metropolis. But now we have *only* the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything ... while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become *one with*" ... (GR 722-23 Viking ed.)

So Geli Tripping and Captain Blicero, at opposite ends of GR's moral spectrum, each seeking transcendence, have the same key vision of humankind's dark, destructive role in an unmediated Creation.

Geli an honorary (though not explicit) member of the Counteforce, sees "defection" from the role of God's spoilers, in the name of Life, as the way out -- an existentialist resistance against implacable odds. Blicero seeks to become one with the process of systematized death in a singular act of carnal obliteration.

1. The master authorial ending of "V," in which TRP conjures a hole in the sea in which he sinks a ship.

2. In Gravity's Rainbow, Slothrop, after the long, difficult day, returns to his room. When Katje opens the door, he tell her that he "Had no place else to go." A-and crossing the threshold/doorway, we are told that he does so without knowing (or caring?) if it's a precipice.

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied?

Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied?

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

RECOMMENDED

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.

With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.

David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)

Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.

Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.

Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.

John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!

We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

SECOND LOOK

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."